24 March 2019

WWII Terrain and Playing Aids

There is no question if I have a chance to play a war game, I will almost certainly play Chain of Command if that is one of the choices. I am currently involved in 2 campaigns (Bloody Bucket set in the 1944 Ardennes and There are Too Many Rivers set in 1940 Belgium) and just started a 3rd campaign the Von Luck set in 1944 Normandy.

For CoC, one needs a number of playing aids, so I have spent a bit of time on these. A couple of Australian CoC gamers have great blogs which are really first rate if you are a CoC player. Check out the great tutorials on The Tactical Painter and John Bond's Wargaming Stuff.

I play the British quite a bit and anyone who plays them knows that the 2" mortar throwing smoke is a tactical necessity. I had made some smoker markers but they were falling apart so I went to work re-constructing a dozen this week.

The game defines them as 3" in diameter. I used a 3" acyrlic base and then used a glue gun to affix the polyester fill to the base. This is much more of a challenge than one would think. The bases were then given a light dusting of panzer grey primer, very thinned, using an airbrush. They were then sprayed with unscented hairspray! I think though I will try one of these fixative spray one hears about as they are still not that solid.

Thes block LOS completely

Next up are some covering fire markers as well as some smoke grenades markers. I really had not used these rules in my games until recently but am starting to find them quite useful.

Same process as above but on a 5" stirring stick

Using a CI a Leader can get a team to lay down covering fire on a piece of terrain. Troops fireing back through covering fire suffer a -1 modifier to hit that lasts until the next phase.

So these are smoke grenades, look carefully and you can see a small cannister on the base which is the grenade with smioke pouring out. I like how this came out.

These also cause a -1 to hit penalty but last until the end of the turn.

I have also painted a couple of bombed out houses as required when a Stuka Attack (from the 1940 Blitzkreig CoC source book). has taken place.

These are Airfix resin models that I bought 3-4 years ago, they are a little small but will work for this purpose.

Finally I also needed some Early War German guns.

Both from Zvezda 1/72 range. Two guns and 6 figures.

3.7cm Pak36 ATG

7.5cm le.IG18

You will note that I have based the figures separately from the guns. I am not sure how happy I am with this but it does decrease the number of gunners required overall (I must be approaching 10 different gun with crews types on both winter and summer terrain bases) and ease play as I do not have to use some type of marker to indicate that a gunner has died. It does not look as nice however and I am still thinking about it.

Winter Terrain

Sarissa Precision Russian Houses, I used Citadel washes to colour them

Winter Hedges

I need a few more of these

My terrain collection is getting pretty extensive now, I believe I probably need to put together some minefields for CoC and Sarissa has really extended their selection of 1/72 buildings which I find are the best sized for WWII gaming.